In the age of digital transformation, where communication services are becoming ever more diverse, it’s no surprise that billing operations are becoming increasingly more complex and challenging to manage. Consequently, the demand for an efficient and comprehensive solution that simplifies the billing process is higher than ever before.
Since the earliest days of trade, billing has always had an important role to play in the business process and, aside from just bringing money into the company, it is essential for maintaining a positive relationship with the customer by keeping them up to date on what services they have used, when they have used them and why.
Taking this into consideration, a failure to address these areas with consistency and precision puts that customer experience in jeopardy and, when you take into account that customer experience (CX) will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020, the risks of substandard billing processes are clear.
So, what is the solution? Well, given that the telecom billing and revenue management market is forecasted to grow from $7.80 billion in 2014 to $11.78 billion by 2019 (at a CAGR of 8.6%), we can assume that more and more service providers and channel resellers will look to telecom billing platforms to improve their billing processes – but what exactly are these and how can they help telecoms and ICT providers achieve more?
What is a telecoms billing platform?
In its simplest form, a telecom billing platform is a software that uses call data records (CDRs; records created each time a call, text message or other type of transaction crosses over a communications network) to measure each customer’s network usage. The billing platform will then rate usage based on customer tariffs and generate each customer’s bill accordingly.
As the communications market has matured, so to have billing platforms. They have evolved to deliver service providers and resellers with powerful, yet simplified solutions for streamlining the billing process as a whole, helping to maximise efficiency and deliver a great customer experience.
Advanced solutions such as the market leading aBILLity™ platform, available from Union Street Technologies, will manage everything from revenue assurance checks to the collation of service charges to invoice deployment. Increasingly, billing platforms are going beyond the billing process to deliver solutions for provisioning services, service management, tackling toll fraud and everything in between.
Key Features
- Automated Billing
- Billing Reports
- Online Billing Portal
- Revenue Assurance
- Fraud Protection
- CRM Software Integration
- Accounting Software Integration
- WLR 3 Integration
What are the benefits?
Rather than using multiple applications, spreadsheets and so on to complete billing runs, one of the major advantages of investing in a telecoms billing platform is that it unifies the billing process into one, easy-to-use application. This can drastically reduce errors and protect both service providers, resellers and end users from the multitude of damages that can occur as a result of oversights and mistakes. Telecoms billing platforms automatically carry out many processes on behalf of the financial department so that all charges can be added up accurately without fault on a consistent basis.
Moreover, as well as ensuring that bills are generated with pinpoint accuracy every time, telecoms billing platforms also help relieve the strain placed on smaller financial departments by carrying out the bulk of the legwork and empowering businesses to accomplish much more with less. As a result, a billing platform is a must have solution for any business that wants to deliver a premium, enterprise-grade billing service.
From a billing management perspective, by incorporating advanced revenue assurance functionalities, telecoms billing platforms can, to varying degrees of effectiveness, help service providers and resellers quickly analyse the value of their products and determine whether or not services are being sold at a loss or if their suppliers are billing them at the correct rate.
